Agent-assisted Tagging aimed at Folkonomy-Based Information Retrieval

The wide diffusion of community tagging sites and related folksonomies has made the knowledge discovery and retrieval still much more urgent topic. If tagging systems allow users to add freely keywords to web resources, clicking on a tag has the side effect of a tag-based query, since enables the users to explore related content. The collective knowledge expressed though user-annotated data has a big potential, but needs to be filtered in a digest form so that the search result better reflects the users' preferences and actual aims. Starting from these considerations, our work presents an agent-based approach for a scalable semi-automatic generation of annotation tags, personalized on each user's preferences and tastes. Primary is the role of agents which assist users in the tagging activities as well as the retrieval of resources related to their interest. A user-friendly interface proposes an integrated one-shot view for interacting with a tagging system

Engagement, role-behaviors and thought-leaders. an analysis of student behavior in asynchronous online learning environments

The rapid growth of online learning has exposed numerous fundamental gaps in our knowledge, both theoretical and pragmatic. This research investigated some fundamental questions of encouraging and maintaining student engagement, the role of emergent leaders in online leaning and the influence of different behaviors. Student behaviors in problem-based Asynchronous Online Discussion boards were analyzed for 10 graduate courses. Content Analysis was performed on discussion board transcripts. Messages were analyzed according to both Socio-Cognitive (Role-Behavior) and Cognitive frameworks (Anderson and Krathwohl, 2001) and student perceptions of peers as Thought-Leaders were elicited. Clear patterns of strong emergent leadership behaviors were evident in the majority of courses. The patterns of interaction and influence indicated that some behavior types (Facilitating) were fundamentally more important for collaborative knowledge building. The presence of strong but facilitating peer leaders was highly correlated with perceived satisfaction, levels of engagement and with objective measures of success such as deepening levels of student discourse. Thought-Leaders could be distinguished from non-Thought-Leaders from both their professional backgrounds and the role-behaviors they exhibited. Student perceptions of peers as Thought-Leaders were highly influenced by factors such as the extent to which students could bring in relevant professional experience into the discussions, a general sense of “quality: of the student posts and the extent to which they started or promoted rich discussion. The Role-behavior framework presented was found to have substantial utility as an analytical framework due to its high concordance with the Anderson and Krathwohl scheme and with objective measures of discussion quality.Ph.D., Information Studies -- Drexel University, 200